The shirt was a work of art. Petra checked the label. Stefano Ricci. She’d spotted one of those in a Melrose vintage boutique. Five hundred bucks used.
Leon smiled at her. Well-built and relatively clean cut. Bereft of cosmetic affectations, a good-looking guy.
Eric handed her the fat wallet he’d found in a pocket of the cargo pants. Inside was a Cal driver’s license that looked real and fifteen hundred dollars, in fifties and twenties. The address on the license was a Hollywood Boulevard number Petra knew to be a mail drop.
Leon said, “Can we talk now?”
CHAPTER 31
The five of them piled into Mac’s Caddy and drove around the corner, to a residential side street. Nice, well-kept houses, a hint of daylight turned everything lilac-gray, almost pretty.
Petra imagined some citizen spotting the old car, phoning it in, Hollywood D’s having to explain to a nervous Valley uniform.
Lyle Leon sat sandwiched in back, between her and Luc. Good cologne- clean, laced with cinnamon. Trying to smile but his mouth wasn’t buying it.
Definitely scared.
Motivation. She liked that. “Tell us your story, Mr. Leon.”
“Marcella was my niece. Sandra’s my third cousin. I was supposed to take care of both of them but it got out of control.”
“Where are their parents?” said Petra.
“Marcella’s father died years ago and her mother left.”
“Left the Players?”
Lyle said, “Can we keep them out of it?”
“That depends on how the story goes.”
“It doesn’t go there,” said Leon. “We’re thieves but we don’t hurt anyone.”
Petra said, “Why’d Marcella’s mother leave?”
“She said she needed space, ended up hooking in Vegas. Marcella was the youngest of four kids. One of my cousins took them all in. Later, it got to be too much and I got Marcella.”
“What Sandra’s story?”
“Sandra’s father’s in jail in Utah for another couple of years and her mother’s got mental problems. What’s the difference? I was put in charge of them and it got out of control. The problem was Venice. We went there last summer, then again this year. The deal was we’d be working Ocean Front walk a couple of hours a day, have the rest of the day to enjoy the beach. The girls loved it.”
“Working how?”
“Selling merchandise. Sunglasses, hats, tourist stuff.”
From the front, Mac said, “You sell tourist junk while they pick pockets?”
Petra felt Leon tense up against her shoulder. Mac was a vet but he was approaching this wrong. Challenging the guy. Leon was a con, maybe worse, but let him talk.
She said, “So you moved to Venice last summer?”
Leon stayed tight. “Picking pockets is crude, sir. We practiced a time-honored American tradition. Buy low, sell high.”
He’d been busted for selling useless house products to old people. Petra pictured fake gold chains that disintegrated into dust, sunglasses that melted in the summer heat.
She said, “The girls loved Venice but it turned out to be a problem.”
“Marcella met a person.” A beat later: “She got pregnant.”
“And had an abortion,” said Petra.
“You know about that.”
“The autopsy showed it.”
“I didn’t know an autopsy could do that… okay, so you know I’m telling the truth.”
“About Marcella getting pregnant? Sure.”
“The abortion,” said Leon, “was what started the problem. Supposedly. That’s not what he said the first time around. Just the opposite, he was furious she hadn’t taken precautions. I had to pay him off, he seemed fine with that. Then he showed up this summer, wanting to know where the baby is. I told him there was no baby and he went nuts.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Omar Selden. A seriously bad person. Gangbanger, though you wouldn’t know to look at him. Half white, half Mexican, something like that. You’ll have him in your records, he did some time for robbery. But never for what he really did.”
“Which was?”
“Killing people,” said Leon. “Lots of them, according to what he told Marcella. Even if half true, he’s a monster.”
“He bragged about killing to Marcella?”
“It impressed her,” said Leon. “Stupid girl.”
“Who’d this Selden kill?”
“He claimed to be the head hit man for his gang- VVO. Said he’d also done freelance work in prison. A hundred bucks and he’d hit someone. I told Marcella it was bullshit ’cause that’s what I thought at the time. I was wrong.”
VVO was Venice Vatos Oakwood. Tight band of low-grade psychopaths, supposedly inactive until last year when they’d resumed shooting people in broad daylight.
Petra remembered one case Milo Sturgis had worked. Family man, clerk at a Good Guys store, mistaken for a VVO dropout and hit while strolling his two-year-old near Ocean Park. The baby spattered with blood, wide-eyed, mute. The shooter, a fourteen-year-old turned out to be learning disabled. Nearsighted, never taken in for a damn eye checkup.
Lyle Leon said, “Once I paid him off, I thought we were free of him. The whole year I never heard from him again so I figured it was okay to return to Venice- the girls had really enjoyed the summer. Then stupid Marcella spots Selden on the walkway. I turn my head for a second and she’s winking at him. And he’s winking back, soon they’re off on the sand, talking. Couple of days later- couple of nights later- he drops by.”
Leon shook his head. “You saw Marcella. Fat, dumpy, those stupid shoes she insisted on wearing. Sandra’s a hard-body, put her in a thong bikini, some Rollerblades, she’d turn heads. So who does Selden develop a thing for? Marcella. And Marcella falls for it.”
Teenagers, thought Petra. Even scam artists couldn’t control them.
Then she flashed on Leon’s leering description of Sandra and wondered where his head was at. Hepatitis A. Unhealthy sexual practices.
Tension filled the car. Mac and the others wondered, too.
“Sandra’s a hard-body,” she said.
“Hey,” said Leon. “I’m being objective. Sandra could attract attention if she wanted to.”
If he wanted her to. Using the girl as a distraction while he and Marcella pulled the scam of the moment. But Marcella had picked up an unwelcome admirer.
She said, “Sandra has hepatitis.”
Leon was silent.
“You knew, Mr. Leon. You showed up with her at the clinic. Did you ever get her any serious medical help?”
“It’s self-limiting. That’s medical talk for it goes away by itself.”
“You’re a doctor, too,” said Petra.
“Listen,” said Leon, “I took good care of those girls. For ten years, on and off, they lived with me and ate well and learned to read and I never touched them. Not once.”
Petra recalled the cramped quarters of the Brooks Avenue shack. A grown man and two hormone-suffused girls.
And the blue ribbon for fatherhood goes to…
She said, “So Omar Selden and Marcella reignited their affair.”
“It wasn’t an affair,” said Leon. “The first summer she snuck away to be with him and he fucked her silly. Idiot doesn’t use a condom and he’s amazed when she gets knocked up. For all I know, he shared her with his friends, wasn’t even the father. One thing he made painfully clear: He wasn’t going to be a father. He threatened me until I paid him off and promised to finance the abortion. Thousand bucks, out of my pocket. A year later, Marcella winks at him and he’s back. The week before the murder, I’m alone in the house ’cause I let the girls go to a concert, some new band at the Troubador. I dropped them off at ten, was supposed to pick them up at two A.M. By eleven I’m back in Venice, mellowing out. At eleven-thirty, the door explodes and Selden is standing over me. He kicked it in, is standing over me, saying where’s my son? Idiot assumed it was a son, all that macho bullshit. I told him there was no baby, I’d done exactly what he wanted. He says ‘No way, man, I never said that.’ I try to reason with him.”